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| sent on 28 Luglio 2024
Pros: 800mm, weight, sharpness, AF.
Cons: Rather than "against", it would be appropriate to consider them for what they really are, that is, "characteristics" of this lens.
Opinion: After a couple of months of almost exclusive use and a few thousand shots taken with R6 and R7, I try to have my say on this lens. Premise: if I had to base the purchase on what I read, especially on the opinions of those who don't have it, or have "tried it for half a day" (a classic now of any forum/site/group/etc), surely I would have avoided it like the plague... But since I'm curious and I like to "try it to believe it", as soon as I found a practically new one, with a lens hood (mandatory!) at the cost I had set myself to spend on a lens that I would have used little, I bought it and I passed the tantrum. The weight is the first positive feature that you notice as soon as you handle it and mount it does not unbalance at all. The autofocus is fast and precise, as well as the stabilizer (was I lucky?), I took bursts of up to 10 frames of birds in flight, all in focus, once locked the subject does not lose it and the results are sharp, detailed photos (as much as photos of subjects often many tens of meters away can be so the environmental conditions etc must be considered, and this applies to any lens...). The "problem" is obviously being able to frame the subject, but do we want to consider it a "defect" of the lens? It is an 800, an "extreme" lens, difficult to use and as such requires at least hundreds of "wrong shots" before understanding how and in what context it should be used, plus it is wrong to compare it with other "apparently" similar lenses (150-600 for everyone), personally I have 2 100-400 (EF II and RF) and with the 800 they have nothing to do ... At most it can be compared to the 800 f/5.6 which costs 10 times as much, but it would be like comparing the usual good Panda with the usual Ferrari (although, looking at the few photos available here in the "galleries", paradoxically it doesn't seem to me that the comparison is ungenerous for him...). As mentioned, I used it on both R6 and R7, walking with the 800 "physically" does not tire, but you have to go out aware that you need to "look from 6 meters onwards", and possibly on days of full sun (but even in this case, R6 and R7 make up very well for the limit imposed by the f/11 and then, for those who have them, the various SW with AI take care of the rest). So, if you think of going out with the 800 as a replacement, for example, for a 100-400, to shoot both distant subjects and butterflies or insects, better to avoid, it is not his job, but do we want to blame him? A "note" for R6 owners: be careful because on the R6 (at least on mine) just mounted it had great difficulty focusing (while on the R7 it was perfect, so I immediately ruled out lens problems), but I had not updated the firmware of the R6 (I still had Ver.1.8.3): updated to 1.8.4, problem solved! (too bad that Canon, in the release document, does not mention this "thing" and who knows how many others...). I didn't notice any big differences between the two configurations, apart of course from having to shoot with much "shorter" shutter speeds with R7 but even in this case, do we want to "blame" the lens? For the rest, with all the limitations that I recognize myself as a "simple avifauna enthusiast", I prefer to let the results obtained in the gallery I dedicated to the 800 f/11 speak for themselves. In conclusion, despite the fact that here some "serial commentators" even claimed that "it should not even have been born", evidently in Canon they do not read forums and this honest, extreme, difficult, controversial lens is there and in my opinion it does its job very well. A "defect", at least in my case, since I normally shoot sports/theater? Sooner or later, like all "extreme" lenses, it will end up in the closet or be resold, but certainly not through its "fault". |